The nexus between modern science and violence is obvious from
the fact that eighty per cent of all scientific research is
devoted to the war industry and is frankly aimed at large-scale
violence. In our times, this violence is directed not only
against enemy fighting forces but also against civilian
populations. I argue that modern science is violent even in
peaceful domains such as, for example, health care and
agriculture, where the professed objective of scientific research
is not violence but human welfare.

The argument is based on the premise that modern science is
quintessentially reductionist. Its reductionist nature
under-girds an economic structure based on exploitation, profit
maximization and capital accumulation. Reductionist science is
also at the root of the growing ecological crisis, because it
entails a transformation of nature such that the processes,
regularities and regenerative capacity of nature are destroyed.

The linkage between modern science and a profit-based economic
system can be discerned in major and varied scourges such as
desertification, diarrhoea, and deforestation. Since the
alternative modes of knowledge which can provide solutions to
these problems are oriented to social benefit rather than to
personal or corporate profits, reductionist science scoffs at
them as hocus-pocus. The fact, however, is that reductionist
science itself often resorts to misinformation and falsehood in
order to establish its monopoly on knowledge.

This monopoly results in fourfold violence - violence against
the subject of knowledge, the object of knowledge, the
beneficiary of knowledge, and against knowledge itself.

Here violence is inflicted on the subject socially through the
sharp divide between the expert and the non-expert - a divide
which converts the vast majority of non-experts into non-knowers
even in those areas of life in which the responsibility of
practice and action rests with them.

But even the expert is not spared: fragmentation of knowledge
converts the expert into a non-knower in fields of knowledge
other than his or her specialization.

The object of knowledge is violated when modern
science, in a mindless effort to transform nature without a
thought for the consequences, destroys the innate integrity of
nature and thereby robs it of its regenerative capacity. The
multidimensional ecological crisis all over the world is an
eloquent testimony to the violence that reductionist science
perpetrates on nature.

Contrary to the claim of modern science that people are
ultimately the beneficiaries of scientific knowledge, people -
particularly the poor - are its worst victims: they are deprived
of their life-support systems in the reckless pillage of nature.
Violence against nature recoils on man, the supposed beneficiary
of all science.

In order to prove itself superior to alternative modes of
knowledge and be the only legitimate mode of knowing,
reductionist science resorts to suppression and falsification of
facts and thus commits violence against science itself, which
ought to be a search for truth. We discuss below how fraudulent
this claim to truth is.

The Politics of Scientific Knowledge

The conventional model of science, technology and society
locates sources of violence in politics and ethics, that is, in
the application of science and technology, not in scientific
knowledge itself.

The fact-value dichotomy is a creation of modern, reductionist
science which, while being an epistemic response to a particular
set of values, claims to be independent of values. According to
the received view, modern science is the discovery of the
properties of nature in accordance with a 'scientific method'
which generates 'objective', 'neutral', 'universal' knowledge.
This view of modern science as a description of reality as it is,
unprejudiced by value, can be rejected on at least four grounds.

All knowledge, including modern scientific knowledge, is built
through the use of a plurality of methodologies. As Feyerabend
observes:

There is no 'scientific method'; there is no single
procedure, or set of rules that underlines every piece of
research and guarantees that it is 'scientific' and,
therefore, trustworthy. The idea of a universal and stable
method that is an unchanging measure of adequacy and even the
idea of a universal and stable rationality is as unrealistic
as the idea of a universal and stable measuring instrument
that measures any magnitude, no matter what the
circumstances. Scientists revise their standards, their
procedures, their criteria of rationality as they move along
and perhaps entirely replace their theories and their
instruments as they move along and enter new domains of
research.1

The view that science is just a discovery of facts about
nature does not get support from philosophy either. If scientific
knowledge is assumed to give true, factual knowledge of 'reality
as it is', then we would have to 'conclude that Newtonian theory
was true until around 1900, after which it suddenly became false,
while relativity and quantum theories became the truth'.2

The view of scientific knowledge as a purely factual
description of nature is also ecologically unfounded Ecology
perceives relationships between different elements of an
ecosystem What properties of a particular element or resource are
picked up for study or for understanding nature depends on the
relationships that are taken as the context defining the
properties. In other words, the context is determined by the
priorities and values guiding the perception of nature Selection
of the context is a value-determined process and the selection,
in turn, determines what properties are seen in nature There is
nothing like a neutral fact about nature, independent of the
values shaped by human cognitive and economic activity Properties
perceived in nature depend on how you look at them, and how you
look depends on the economic interest you have in the resources
of nature, Looking does not create properties, but it definitely
creates conditions for their perception, Economic values of a
particular type generate perceptions and uses of nature that
reinforce these values, The value of profit maximization, for
example, determines a particular way of looking at nature.

It is the central claim of this chapter that capitalist logic
is inseparably and dialectically linked with the reductionist
character of contemporary science which, in turn, has a set of
distinctive characteristics which demarcates it from all other
non-reductionist knowledge systems, Reductionism provides the
assumptions and criteria which guide modern science, The basic
assumptions are ontological and epistemological,

The ontological assumptions of reductionism are: (a) that a
system is reducible to its parts; and (b) that all systems are
made up of the same basic constituents which are discrete and
atomistic; and (c) that all systems have the same basic processes
which are mechanical,

The epistemological assumptions of reductionism are: (a) that
knowledge of the parts of a system gives knowledge of the whole
system; (6) that 'experts' and 'specialists' are the only
legitimate knowledge-seekers and knowledge-justifiers.

The Politics of Reductionism

The ontological and epistemological components of the
reductionist worldview provide the framework for a particular way
of doing science, which is projected as the 'scientific method',
that is, as the only reliable and objective way of discovering
the facts of nature and correctly understanding nature, Deriving
its inspiration and authority from Descartes, modern science
gives the Cartesian method a twist to christen it the sole
'scientific method', According to Descartes,

Method consists entirely in the order of disposition of
the objects towards which our mental vision must be directed
if we would find out any truth. We shall comply with it
exactly if we reduce involved and obverse propositions
step by step to those that are simpler, and then starting
with the intuitive apprehension of all those that are
absolutely simple, attempt to ascend to the knowledge of all
other precisely similar steps.3

This reductionist method has its uses in the fields of
abstraction such as logic and mathematics, and in the fields of
manmade artefacts such as mechanics But it fails singularly to
lead to a perception of reality (truth) in the case of living
organisms such as nature, including man, in which the whole is
not merely the sum of the parts, if only because the parts are so
cohesively interrelated that isolating any part distorts
perception of the whole

In any event, there is no warrant for the claim that the
reductionist method is a 'scientific method', much less the sole
scientific method. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Michael Polanyi
and others have convincingly argued that modern science does not
proceed according to a well-defined and stable scientific method
All that can be granted to reductionist science is that it is an
approach, a way of looking, a mode of thought Considering its
predatory treatment of nature, attested to by the ecological
crisis, it is indeed a very unreliable way.

Controlled experiment in the laboratory is a central element
of the methodology of reductionist science The object of study is
arbitrarily isolated from its natural surroundings, from its
relationship with other objects and observer(s) The context (the
value framework) so provided determines what properties are
perceived in nature, and leads to a particular set of beliefs
about nature.

There is threefold exclusion in this methodology: (i)
ontological, in that other properties are not taken note of; (ii)
epistemological, in that other ways of perceiving and knowing are
not recognized; and (iii) sociological, in that the non-expert is
deprived of the right both of access to knowledge and of judging
the claims of knowledge

All this is the stuff of politics, not science Picking one group
of people (the specialists), who adopt one way of knowing
the physical world (the reductionist), to find one set of
properties in nature (the reductionist/mechanistic), is a
political, not a scientific, act It is this act that is claimed
to be the 'scientific method'. The knowledge obtained is
presented as 'the laws of nature' - wholly 'objective' and
altogether universal Feyerabend is therefore right in saying:

The appearance of objectivity that is attached to some
value judgements comes from the fact that a particular
tradition is used but not recognized. Absence of the
impression of subjectivity is not proof of objectivity, but
an oversight.4

It is argued in defence of modern science that it is not
science but the political misuse of science and the unethical
technological application of science that lead to violence The
speciousness of the argument was always clear, but is totally
untenable in today's world, when science and technology have
become cognitively inseparable and the amalgam has been
incorporated into the economic system Fragmentation of science
into a variety of specializations and sub-specializations is used
as a smokescreen to blur the perception of this linkage between
science and a particular model of social organization - that is,
a particular ideology Science claims that since scientific truths
are verifiable, they are justified beliefs and therefore
universal, regardless of the social context.

The verificationist model of science was forcefully presented
by positivism It claimed that verification was direct observation
of the 'facts' of nature, free from the proclivities of the
observer This was, however, challenged by post-positivist
philosophers Kuhn, for example, showed that facts and data in
science are determined by the theoretical commitment of
scientists In other words, scientific facts are determined by the
social world of scientists, not by the natural world.

While the Kuhnian model challenged the neutrality of
scientific facts, it failed to provide an adequate
epistemological framework for handling the violence of
reductionist science By insisting that 'nature fits into the
realistic boxes of paradigms', Kuhn rendered his model of science
materially and politically vacuous Moreover, he failed to take
into account the value system of the larger society that
determines the choice of scientific research. Value-determination
in the Kuhnian model is done by scientific paradigms, not by
social, political, economic interests. By restricting itself to
the social world of scientists, the Kuhnian model is unable to
deal with the more significant value-determination of scientific
facts by the demands made on the science system by economic
interests. Moreover, by restricting himself to the material world
of the lab, Kuhn was unable to deal with those ecological
situations in which reductionist claims are falsified by nature,
as symbolized by ecological crises.

A more appropriate account of modern science (including
technology) should extend the Kuhnian model both materially and
socially. Materially, the testing of scientific beliefs has to be
taken out of cloistered labs into the wider physical world.
Socially, the world of scientific experiments and beliefs has to
be extended beyond the social organization of science to the
social organization of society. The verification and validation
of a scientific system would then be validation in practice,
where practice is real-life activity in society and nature.

Profits, Reductionism and Violence

The artificial cognitive dichotomy between science and
technology dissolves when science is viewed as a set of beliefs
guiding practice, and technology as practice guided by scientific
belief. The duality between belief and action, thought and
practice, is responsible for encouraging many to mistake the
cognitive weaknesses of reductionism for cognitive success

Reductionism, however, is not an epistemological accident. It
is related to the needs of a particular form of economic
organization. The reductionist worldview, the industrial
revolution and the capitalist economy were the philosophical,
technological and economic components of the same process.
Individual firms and fragmented sectors of the economy, whether
privately or publicly owned, have their own efficiency needs in
mind; and every firm and sector measures its efficiency by the
extent to which it maximizes its gains, regardless of the fact
that in the process it also maximizes the social and ecological
costs of the production process The logic of this internal
efficiency is provided by reductionism: only those properties of
a resource system are taken into account which generate profits
through exploitation and extraction; properties which stabilize
ecological processes but are commercially non-exploitative are
ignored and eventually destroyed.

The rationality and efficacy of the reductionist and
non-reductionist knowledge systems are never evaluated
cognitively The rationality of reductionist science is declared a
priori superior, even though it can be argued that if
reductionist science has displaced non-reductionist modes of
knowledge, it has done so not through cognitive competition, but
through political support from the state and the state's
development policies and development programmes which provide
both financial subsidies and ideological support for the
appropriation of nature for profits Since the twin myths of
progress (material prosperity) and superior rationality have lost
their sheen in the working out of development patterns and
paradigms, and have been visibly exploded by the widespread
ecological crisis, the state has stepped in to transform myths
into an ideology When an individual firm or sector directly
confronts the larger society in its commercial appropriation of
nature, people can assess the costs and benefits for themselves;
they can differentiate between progress and regression,
rationality and irrationality But with the mediation of the
state, the citizen-as-subject becomes the object of change
rather than its determinant and consequently loses the right to
assess progress. If they have to bear the costs instead of
reaping any benefit of 'development', it is justified as a minor
sacrifice for the 'national interest'.

The link between the state and the creation of surplus value
provides the power with which reductionism establishes its
supremacy Institutions of learning in agriculture, medicine and
forestry, for instance, selectively train people in reductionist
paradigms, which are given the names respectively of 'scientific
agriculture', 'scientific medicine' and 'scientific forestry', to
prove the superiority of reductionist science Stripped of the
power the state invests it with, such a science can be seen to be
cognitively weak and ineffective in responding to problems posed
by nature As a system of knowledge about nature, reductionist
science is weak and inadequate; as a system of knowledge for the
market, it is powerful and profitable

Reductionist Ecology

Reductionism has lately invaded the specialized branch of
biology dealing with organisms' relations to one another and to
their surroundings, known as ecology It appears in the garb of
the saviour of the ecosystem, now in peril too grave to be denied
or ignored. Nothing could be more ironical than the claim of the
destroyer to be the saviour But if the claim is ironical, the
remedy that reductionist ecology proposes is grotesquely
chilling, as we shall presently see But let us first see how a
pioneer of this ecology goes about it. Argues Garrett Hardin in
his 'Tragedy of Commons':

Picture a pasture common to all. It is to be expected that
each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on
the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably
satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching,
and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below
the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes
the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long desired
goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point the
inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates
tragedy...

Adding together the component partial utilities the
rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for
him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And
another; and another... But this is the conclusion reached by
each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein
is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels
him to increase his herd without limit - in a world that is
limited. Ruin is the destination towards which all men rush,
each pursuing his own best interest in a society that
believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons
brings ruin to all.5

Hardin chooses not to disclose the assumptions underlying this
perverse logic (Hardin's, which he foists on the poor
unprotesting herdsman). These assumptions are: (a) that each
herdsman sees himself as an atomized individual who is pitted
against the rest of the community in deadly competition for
grabbing as much of the common goods as he can; (b) that in all
societies production is not for satisfaction of needs, but for
exchange in a monetized market with a view to making immediate
profit; and (c) that every herdsman is so short-sighted
('rational' in Hardin's vocabulary) as to sacrifice his future
survival on the altar of immediate gain.

Such a poor opinion of herdsman's intelligence comes naturally
to the ruling Úlites (especially of the 'modernizing' third
world) and to establishment scientists who, comfortably cocooned
in their claustral specializations, remain innocent of history or
sociology or social psychology. However, history tells us that
competition has not always been the driving force in societies.
And sociology tells us that it need not necessarily be so today
and tomorrow. Even today, despite the frenetic drive for
'modernization', considerable parts of the rural societies of
third-world countries are still outside the competitive market,
for exchange is still the predominant motive for production in
subsistence economies.

The general logic of the 'tragedy of the Commons' does not
operate in such situations. It is true, though, that in certain
circumstances - those, for instance, in which the commons cannot
provide for the basic needs of the population - a tragedy may
occur even without competition. But that tragedy can be handled.
There is another situation in which tragedy is inevitable and
becomes unmanageable. It is created when the largest commons,
nature, is mindlessly pillaged and life-support systems
irreversibly ruined by those who are confident that they will not
suffer the consequences of their action. Such a situation (which
is no longer hypothetical but has become a harsh fact of life) is
created by big business, multinational or national, which has
perfect mobility of capital (from one sector to another and from
one country to another). It is therefore unencumbered with the
responsibility for preserving natural resources. It has no
difficulty in folding up one business and moving into another
even more profitable one.

That is the real tragedy of the commons. In the words of
Daniel Fife:

The tragedy of the commons may appear to be occurring but
in fact something quite different is really happening. The
commons is being killed but someone is getting rich. The
goose that lays golden eggs is being killed for profit.6

The survival of common property, such as pastures and village
copses, and common goods, such as a stable ecology, are possible
only in a society in which checks and controls on the utilization
of resources are built into the organizing principle of the
society. The breakdown of such a community, with the consequent
collapse of the principles of common ownership and shared
responsibility, spells progressive degradation and the eventual
ruin of common resources. This is happening in most third world
countries.

The remedy preferred by reductionist ecologists for such a
state of affairs is a reflection of the ethics with which their
kind of science works. For no matter what label is given it -
Hardin calls it 'ecology' and the third-world Úlites call it
'development' - the reductionist prescription is a prescription
for genocide combined with ecocide. Some are frank about it, as
Garrett Hardin is. He pulls no punches in advocating the
liquidation of the poor (especially in the third world) through
'game management' and/or 'war of attrition', and justifies both
as 'lifeboat ethics'. Some, such as the third-world Úlites,
though coy about it, plan to achieve the same result by depriving
the poor of their life-support system, thereby condemning them to
slow death in the name of 'development'. It becomes in effect a
war of attrition.

So much for genocide. As for ecocide, we shall choose a few
out of several examples.

Eucalyptus Planting

Desertification and its consequence, famine, has already
caused the death of over 900,000 people in Ethiopia. In the
Sahel, 40 to 90 per cent of the livestock has died.

Nearer home, starvation deaths owing to scarcity are a
recurrent phenomenon in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa.
Although officialdom has no eyes for it, and the 'free but
cooperative press' of India - J. K. Galbraith's description - has
no space for it, such deaths occasionally make a splash when a
political bigwig is accidentally confronted by it, as happened
during the Prime Minister's tour of drought-hit Orissa when a
hapless woman named Parasi Punji made bold to tell the Prime
Minister how drought had forced her to sell her sister-in-law for
Rs 40 to feed her three starving children.

Since ancient times societies have known that forests are the
best insurance against desertification and famine. The
reductionist version of this response to desertification is
itself a prescription for desertification. Under the World Food
Programme, FAO is planting eucalyptus in Ethiopia. Under the
social forestry schemes for ecological repair, the World Bank,
SIDA, USAID have coaxed India into putting farmlands under
eucalyptus. People who for centuries have been planters and
protectors of trees have suddenly been marginalized. Knowledge of
tree planting has become the sole preserve of international and
national bureaucracies. Throughout the world, irrespective of
local ecological conditions and economic needs, the prescription
is only one - eucalyptus. The biological wealth and diversity of
the tropics have been destroyed to make room for the reductionist
solution, even though eucalyptus causes rather than cures
deserts, upsets the cycle of life, the hydrological cycle and the
nutrient cycle.

The ecological audit of eucalyptus plantations reveals that it
involves heavy economic costs through the destruction of the
hydrological stability and soil productivity in the following
ways:7

First, in regions which have water scarcity, the high water
intake of eucalyptus destroys the natural processes that
replenish soil moisture and recharge the sources of underground
water, turning the region into a completely arid zone. Moreover,
eucalyptus damages the innate allelomorphic capacity of all other
plants, seriously depleting the gene pool. The process initiated
by large-scale cultivation of eucalyptus in water-scarce regions
therefore leads inexorably to desertification.

Second, on fertile agricultural lands, eucalyptus, when
planted and harvested in short rotation, heavily diminishes soil
nutrients, destroying the soil's capacity for biological
productivity. Moreover, eucalyptus destroys the environment for
soil fauna that are at once 'factories' for reproducing soil
fertility, and efficient 'machines' for maintaining the soil
structure.

In the countries of the South, desertification has become an
increasingly severe threat to human survival. The recently
published UNEP report on deserts estimates that about 3.5 million
hectares of productive and fertile rain-fed land is being lost
annually. The food crisis in Africa testifies to the cost of
desertification in human and economic terms. It is also a
reminder that many of the economic problems of the poorest of
mankind are rooted in the ecological destruction caused by
excessive demands on the natural resources by the Úlites of the
world.

Eucalyptus emerged as a magical candidate for all kinds of
afforestation programmes during the 1960s because it is a
fast-growing species. This belief was, however, challenged and it
was shown that many indigenous species have higher growth rates
than eucalyptus. It was then admitted that

The whole question of fast growth has come to light only
because of the pulp industry gaining importance. How to get
adequate pulp quickly was our problem. It is with this
reference that we had to try various species not only
indigenous, but also exotic. While trying the exotics, we
found the eucalyptus quite useful.8

In spite of eucalyptus being fast-growing and productive only
in the narrow context of wood-fibre production, it was prescribed
as a universal means for achieving increased productivity of
biomass for the satisfaction of diverse needs. And so, a
reductionist view of forestry wedded to the pulp industry was
universalized at the cost of conservation of soil and water.

The rapid decline, and even total destruction, of water
resources as a consequence of large-scale planting of eucalyptus
has been reported from all parts of India. Sunderlal Bahuguna
recorded the following statement of an elderly forest ranger in
the Nainital tarai of Uttar Pradesh: 'We felled mixed
natural forest of this area and planted eucalyptus.... Our
handpumps have gone dry as the water-table has gone down. We have
committed a sin.' Mahashweta Devi described the impact of
eucalyptus on the water resources in the tribal areas of Bihar
and West Bengal in the following words:

I am concerned with the India I know. My India is of the poor,
starving and helpless people. Most of them are landless and the
few who have land are happy to be able to make most of the given
resources. To cover Purulia, Bankura, Midnapur, Singbhum,
Palamau, with eucalyptus will be to rob my India of drinking and
irrigation water.9

On 10 August 1983, the farmers of Barka and Holahalli villages
in Tumkur district, in Karnataka, marched en masse to the
forest nursery and pulled out millions of eucalyptus seedlings,
inserting tamarind and mango seeds in their place. According to
them, eucalyptus plantation in the catchment area of the streams
feeding their agricultural land had made them go dry. Describing
the state of the main stream feeding the village
Guttalagolahalli, a local farmer complained, 'Earlier we would
take our cattle to this stream in the summer. But now, as the
stream is dry, we have to fetch water from a well.'10

Yet, forestry experts refuse to accept this, presumably
because it hurts their own dominance and that of the interests
they serve. The president of the Forest Research Institute of
India, K. M. Tiwari, and R. S. Mathur, in a paper published in a
special issue of the Indian Express, writes:

Of late in India a lot of controversy has arisen over the
water consumption behaviour of eucalyptus planted in
afforestation programme in social forestry. It has been
alleged that eucalyptus plantation consumes large quantities
of water to the extent that they deplete local water
resources such as streams, wells, etc. This notion does not
appear to be correct, as no experimental data in support has
so far been presented.... There is no scientific basis in the
popular fallacy that eucalyptus lowers the ground-water
table.11

Scientific fact and empirical reality have thus been
conveniently reduced to a fallacy. With the help of a controlled
experiment, the foresters have manufactured a new justification
for the propagation of eucalyptus. Having found that all
recognized and established scientific information was
delegitimizing eucalyptus as a fast-growing tree, the forest
establishment in India has rejected these data and initiated
their 'controlled' experiments after the emphasis on eucalyptus
in Indian social forestry was challenged in 1981. The Forest
Department of Uttar Pradesh produced some data in 1983 on the
biomass production of a few tree species, including eucalyptus
hybrid (Table 7.1).12

The data of this single-plant experiment on one-year-old
juveniles became the proverbial straw the official foresters
clutched at to legitimize the bias of their kind in favour of
eucalyptus. This gave the green signal to all eucalyptus
plantations, in all agro-climatic conditions, in all parts of the
country. In the history of forestry science in the world there is
no parallel to this unrealistic extrapolation of a juvenile
single-plant data to large-scale afforestation programmes
unmindful of the well-established fact of non-uniform growth
rates of eucalyptus at different ages.

One can easily see the inapplicability of the Kanpur data to
mature trees. Eucalyptus, the low leaf litter of which is well
known from measurements made in plantation studies, comes out as
the best leaf producer in the Kanpur 'controlled' experiment. Pongamia
pinnata, which is famous for its high crown biomass output,
is reduced, in the Kanpur experiment, to a tuber crop with
extremely low crown biomass output, less even than its root. The
much advertised Kanpur data does not reflect the field reality
and does not satisfy minimum scientific criteria. Reflecting on
this point, D. R. Bhumla, a renowned agricultural scientist, at a
Planning Commission meeting on eucalyptus, cautioned:

There are no data to show that eucalyptus produced more
biomass than other species like Acacia nilotica, Dalbergia
sissoo and Prosopis juliflora. Hence there was no
strong case for advocating eucalyptus in social and farm
forestry. However, it might be useful for pulp production On
unirrigated lands, raising eucalyptus plantation would result
in disaster. The poor and marginal farmers should be provided
with enough data on eucalyptus before persuading them to take
to eucalyptus.13

Reductionist forestry science is intimately linked to
forest-based industry, notwithstanding its claim to be
'objective'. When its violence to nature through desertification,
and its violence to man through famine, is exposed, official
foresters turn on the victims of desertification and accuse them
of colossal ignorance of the science of forestry. But this
science does not balk at manufacturing data to legitimize
misinformation; it violates the tradition of science itself to
deny people the right to know and to hide, under the protective
umbrella of the state, the nexus between modern science and
capital accumulation.

Traditional, or what the reductionist worldview calls
unscientific, systems of food production have managed pest
control by a series of measures which include building up plant
resistance, practicing rotational and mixed cropping, and
providing habitats for pest-predators in farm trees and
hedgerows. These practices created stable local conditions; a
balance was achieved between plants and their pests through
natural competition, selection and predator-prey relationships.
Myths are generally found to be important sources of traditional
knowledge about quiet but essential ecological processes. For
example, the Kayape Indians of the Amazon basin have a ritual in
which the women paint their faces with ant parts in the maize
festival. The principal theme of the myth is the celebration of
the little red ant as the guardian of the fields and a friend of
women. This would seem a useless ritual from the reductionist
point of view, but Posey points out:

The myth begins to make sense when we understand the
co-evolutionary complex of maize, beans, manioc and this ant.
Manioc produces an extra floral nectar that attracts the ants
to the young manioc plant. The ants use their mandibles to
make their way to the nectar cutting away any bean vines that
would prevent the new, fragile manioc stems from growing. The
twining bean vines are, therefore, kept from climbing on the
manioc and are left with the maize plants as their natural
trellis. The maize can shoot up undamaged by the bean vines,
while the bean plant itself furnishes valuable nitrogen
needed by the maize. The ants are the natural manipulator of
nature and facilitate the horticultural activities of women.14

'Scientific' farming upset this balance and created favourable
conditions for the multiplication of disease. Organic fertilizer,
which builds up plant resistance to disease, was replaced by
chemical fertilizers, which decrease plant resistance to pests.
Since many pests are specific to particular plants, replacing
crop rotations by the planting of the same crop year after year
often encourages pest build-ups. Substitution of a mixed cropping
pattern by monoculture also makes crops more prone to pest
attacks. The mechanization of farming leads to the destruction of
hedgerows and trees, and thus destroys the habitat for some
pest-predators.

The problem of pest control was therefore mostly a problem
created by the disturbance of the ecological balance of
agro-ecosystems by the introduction of 'scientific agriculture'.
Reductionist science was concerned merely with the existence of
pests, not with the ecology of pests. The solution that suited
both science and the pesticide industry was production and sale
of poisons to kill pests. As a pesticide company announced in a
TV advertisement, 'The only good bug is a dead bug.'

This approach failed, or refused, to recognize that pests have
natural enemies that have the unique property of regulating pest
populations. According to De Bach:

The philosophy of pest control by chemicals has been to
achieve the highest kill possible, and percent mortality has
been the main yardstick in the early screening of new
chemicals in the lab. Such an objective, the highest kill
possible, combined with ignorance of, or disregard for,
target insects and mites is guaranteed to be the quickest
road to upsets, resurgences and the development of re
sistance to pesticides.15

De Bach's research on DDT-induced pest increases showed that
these could be anywhere from 36-fold to over 1200-fold.

Interference with natural balance also fails to anticipate and
predict what will happen when that balance is upset. Besides
reflecting the cognitive weakness of the approach of over-kill,
the violence of the pestcide-based approach decreases plant
resistance, increases pest attacks and the need for even more
pesticides. Gradually, pesticides are absorbed by plants and
animals in ever-increasing quantities. Rachel Carson's The
Silent Spring remains the best commentary on how pesticides
are becoming a major source of water pollution and health
hazards.

The claims made by reductionist science and the pesticides
industry about the damage to crops prevented by pesticides have a
persuasive ring because the effect of pesticides is visible.

A heap of bugs killed in a lightning operation can be
dramatized and turned into an impressive sight and good selling
point. Natural enemies of pests, on the other hand, although more
effective because they do not produce any destructive fall-out
for flora, fauna and humans, work quietly and invisibly and
cannot therefore be shown on the TV screen dancing round a heap
of bugs. Chemical pesticides are successful but indiscriminate
killers; they kill not only pests, but the natural enemies of
pests also.

This mystification of violence as control runs right through
the entire scientific process, from the 'controlled' experiments,
which are not real-life experiments, for they do not compare the
biological to the chemical control of pests. It is therefore
possible to make fantastic claims, such as those of D. G.
Hessayan of the British Agrochemicals Association, who said, 'The
effect of not spraying tropical crops would of course be
disastrous, and the resulting famine would be the greatest
disaster the world has ever known.'16

Testing of pesticides is carried out primarily on the
basis of acute toxicity, that is, effects from short-term,
comparatively high doses.... It is fine to test for acute
toxicity, but what if there are undetected effects on humans,
effects that may not show up for many years or generations?
Our limited testing is unlikely to find out. Cancer may take
20 to 30 years to appear. And animal experience is especially
unreliable in tests for cancer, mutations, and allergies
which are less transferable between species than acute
toxicity.... The testing procedure also neglects a number of
other factors: possible interaction between residues and
other food additives; hazard of metabolic products; increased
susceptibility of the young and the weak (because tests are
run on healthy animals); and the possible adverse nutritional
effects of induced metabolic changes in food. All these
considerations indicate some degree of increased risk to
consumers and society from continued use of chemical
pesticides.17

That ignorance, irrationality and greed are characteristics of
the pesticide industry have been tragically revealed in the
Bhopal disaster. Union Carbide was simultaneously a creator of
scientific knowledge, profits and violence.

But in spite of its complete failure to solve the problem of
pest control, and in spite of its violence against nature and
humans, the sale of pesticides continues to increase, because its
use is insured through state agricultural policy, through
pesticide subsidies and through pesticide propaganda, and also
because pesticides destroy the ecological basis of the
alternative systems of pest management that show better and
longer-lasting results.

Drugs

Here was the medicine, the patient died and no one asked:
who thrived? So have we with hellish electuaries.... I have
myself given the poison to thousands. They withered, I must
live to see the impudent murderers praised. - Goethe, Faust

Medicine is generally presented as an area in which modern
science has the most achievements and successes to its credit.
But there is increasing evidence that modern medicine and
therapeutics have themselves become a source of disease and
death. According to Ivan Illich, diseases brought on by doctors
are a greater cause of increased mortality than traffic accidents
and war-related activities. Iatrogenic illnesses cause between
60,000 to 140,000 deaths in America alone each year, and leave 2
to 5 million others more or less seriously ill. The situation is
worst in establishments which generate medical knowledge, viz.
university hospitals where one in five patients contracts an
iatrogenic disease which usually requires special treatment, and
leads to death in one case out of thirty.18

'Scientific medicine' extends its monopoly even to those cases
of common diseases in which people would get well without
therapeutic intervention. It only converts simple problems into
serious or fatal ones. Thus, diarrhoea has always been a common
illness managed traditionally by diet control and rehydration.
Rice water, kanji, isabgol, curd, coconut water are just a few
among the numerous traditionally-established means for
controlling diarrhoea in tropical countries like India.

When 'scientific medicine' steps in, it reduces the problem of
diarrhoea to the existence of a discrete entity in the guts that
can be cured only by drugs. This shifts the focus from the
patient to the disease and applies solutions which result in
violence on the patient, both through drugs and the side effects
of drugs. 'It [is] not necessary to cure the patient, but the
disease itself must be the focus of medical attention with the
patient as a kind of inert carrier of his condition. The doctor
[is] not interested in equilibrium. He [is] at war.'19

Clioquinol was introduced as an anti-diarrhoeal drug in 1934
by Ciba-Geigy under the brand names of Mexaform and
Enterovioform. Although its effectiveness was established only
for amoebiasis in lab and clinical trials, its therapeutic action
was extrapolated to all kinds of diarrhoea. Clioquinol was
indicated for summer, traveller's or unspecified diarrhoea,
gastro-enteritis, colitis, and digestive disorders associated
with diarrhoea. It was even suggested for prophylactic use. It
therefore became a commonly dispensed drug for common ailments.

Ciba and the scientists working in its support universalized
the efficacy of the drug on the basis of scanty information in
order to capture larger markets. But this medical 'science'
showed an amazing reluctance to use information already available
about the toxic effects of the drug. As early as 1935 two cases
with severe neurological symptoms and signs were reported in
Argentina, and one of the authors of the report informed the drug
company about the suspected adverse effects. Between 1935 and
1970 the potential risk of irreversible neurological damage was
documented in the medical literature as well as in the internal
files of CIBA. According to late Dr Olle Hanson, 'Attempts to
hide facts, deny facts and attempts to convince doctors not to
publish their negative experimental findings have been made
throughout by Ciba-Geigy, the producers of Mexaform and
Enterovioform.'20

The cost of hiding these facts in order to continue sales was
the crippling of an estimated 10,000-30,000 people in Japan also,
where the prescription of clioquinol led to a SMON epidemic, a
severe neurological disorder caused by the drug. SMON stands for
'Subacute Mylo Optic Neuropathy'; in plain English it means loss
of sight, loss of function of legs, loss of bladder control, and
constant pain in the legs.

Introducing two SMON patients to a press conference in Geneva
in 1980, Dr Beppu, a neurologist, said:

I would like to introduce these patients in order to
present to you the realities of SMON and give a brief
description of the disease.

Let me first introduce Mrs Michike Kinoshita. She had been
happy and well as a housewife with three children until she
fell ill ill 1960. After having an operation to remove a
bowel obstruction in 1960, Mrs Kinoshita visited her local
doctor to complain of occasional diarrhoea and abdominal
pain. Later, as part of her treatment, she was given 6
Enterovioform tablets per day from January to November 1966.
She therefore consumed a total of 329 gms of clioquinol. She
began complaining of numbness in both legs and feeling
something unusual attached to the soles of her feet, in the
middle of May of the same year. These symptoms were gradually
followed by muscular weakness of the lower limbs and
difficulty in walking. The numbness slowly extended from the
distal end of the legs to the knees and thighs, and then
progressed gradually upward with indescribable dysaesthesia,
sharp pain and a feeling of tightness, in addition to sensory
disturbance. In August, she also had paresis and numbness of
the upper extremities and was unable to get up. In autumn of
the same year, blurred vision and speech difficulties also
occurred. Several months after stopping the administration of
Enterovioform in November, paresis and sensory disturbances
showed a slight improvement. However, now she is still not
capable of walking and suffers from severe visual disorders
and continuous dysaesthesia of the trunk and lower
extremities.21

In 1970, Professor Tadao Tsubaku discovered that SMON was
caused by clioquinol. In 1971, 5000 SMON victims filed law suits
in Japan against Ciba-Geigy. In spite of all the evidence, the
drug company stated that there might be another factor to cause
SMON, but could not prove any factor besides clioquinol through
eight years of examination. The company that had generalized the
efficacy of the drug for all kinds of diarrhoea considered all
the evidence inadequate to prove the side effects of the drug.
The Tokyo district court, however, decided that clioquinol was
the cause of SMON.

The next 'scientific' move by Ciba smacked of racism. It said
that the Japanese were genetically prone to SMON. That canard was
exploded when Dr Hanson found forty cases of SMON in Sweden. It
became evident that the high incidence of the disease in Japan
was due to overprescription - because the doctor's income in the
Japanese health system depends on the quantity of drugs he
prescribes. The second reason is related to reductionism and the
myth of the universal validity of modern science, which ignores
the fact that since the Japanese are of a smaller build than
Europeans and Americans, the dose advised per kilogram is
relatively large for the Japanese people.

Even the discovery of cases outside Japan was not accepted as
an adequate reason to suspend sales of the drug. At the Geneva
press conference on SMON in 1980, Dr Sabatkiewiez of Ciba-Geigy
stated:

We have no medical reason to be afraid of this drug. I
have seen clioquinol used in tropical countries. I know there
is need for it, and we have no - I repeat Medical reason to
withdraw the produce from the market at this moment.22

As Ciba-Geigy continued to market the drug, SMON victims from
Japan raised funds to inform people in other countries of the
hazards of the drug. Pressure mounted on Ciba-Geigy when
Scandinavian doctors boycotted its product and demanded
withdrawal of Mexaform and Enterovioform from the third world.
When, in 1978, Ciba eventually announced the withdrawal of the
drugs, there was a hue and cry from some doctors in India who
could not comprehended why such a 'wonderful' drug was being
withdrawn; they did not know that the drugs had been proved to be
harmful. And no wonder; for it is in the nature of their science
to close the lid on correct and full information, and to
disseminate misinformation. That is why the clioquinol
controversy did not deter drug companies from continuing to
manufacture hazardous drugs on the inexperts' certificates about
safety. For, without an adequate and appropriate challenge of the
kind that was offered to Ciba, the modern medical system is left
free to grow in direct proportion to the damage it does.

Scientific medicine uses different criteria for measuring a
drug's strength and weakness. It uses one set of criteria for
efficacy and quite another for drug-toxicity. And this is
supposed to be a system of knowledge which is 'objective', which
has no bias. In the case of Ciba it was because of the
involvement of doctors and the public in a campaign that the bias
came out in the open. In most cases, the bias lies undiscovered
and passes for neutral, objective, universal science.

Simple ailments have been cured over centuries by appropriate
use of dococtions made from plants and minerals found in nature.
'Scientific medicine' removes the diversity by isolating 'active'
ingredients or by synthesizing chemical combinations. Such
processing first involves violence against the complex balance
inherent in natural resources. And then, when the chemical is
introduced into the human body, it is often a violation of human
physiology.

The two most common reasons used to defend the practice of
extracting from a plant a more toxic and therapeutically
narrow substance are that such a substance is easier to take
and easier to standardize and control exactly. But it is
questionable to what extent this control is to the benefit of
the patient as opposed to the benefit of principles ofscientific
exactitude. For it often means that a plant with a rich
variety ofconstituents is converted into a pill
containing, say, exactly zoo mg of a single compound which is
then prescribed in the same manner to everyone. In this case
control has been lost, not gained....

The processing and synthesis of remedies is often
unnecessary on therapeutic grounds and is carried out only
for commercial reasons. There is plenty of evidence now that
this purification habit has the inevitable sequel of deriving
a pure toxic drug from a harmless medicinal plant. For
example, reserpine was isolated from rauwolfia, and used
extensively as a psycho-active drug in the West until severe
side effects were recognized....

On therapeutic grounds it is often better to leave the
components as a balanced mixture than indulge in fruitless
and costly attempts at purification. The chemical fish you
pull out of a natural produce depends only on the habit you
use to catch and identify it. There are always fish left
uncaught.23

But it is highly unlikely that medical science and
pharamaceutical establishments will pay heed. For the
reductionist medical science cannot but manufacture reductionist
products and undermine the balance inherent in natural products.
The multinationals that produce synthetic drugs in pursuit of
fabulous profits and ignore their toxic side effects do not care.
When they are forbidden to sell some harmful drugs in the home
countries, they find a lucrative market in the third world, where
the Úlites, including the medical establishment, are usually
bewitched by anything that is offered as scientific, especially
if it comes wrapped in pretty pay-offs. They give a free hand to
multinationals to buy medicinal plants at dirt-cheap rates and
sell the processed pills in the third-world countries at
exorbitant prices and at enormous cost to the health of the
people. The Úlites cannot accept that it would be more equitable
socially, cheaper economically, conductive to self-reliance
politically, and more beneficial medically for the third-world
countries to use the plants locally according to time-tested
indigenous pharmacology.

While multinational drug companies and the third-world
political Úlites are out for profits, the third-world
intellectual Úlites, eager to prove their scientific temper,
join in a chorus to denounce indigenous therapeutics and related
knowledge systems as hocus-pocus and their practice as quackery.
It is through this mixture of misinformation, falsehood and
bribes that a reductionist medical science has established its
monopoly on medical knowledge in many societies.

And, as we have seen, the links between modern medical
science, violence and profits are not only through politics and
economics but also, as in the case of agriculture and scientific
forestry, through the internally determined structure and content
of the system of scientific knowledge.

III

Protest against reductionist science is emerging in all
spheres. In India, for instance, the famous 'Chipko' movement is
a movement against reductionist forestry; organic farming
movements are challenges to reductionist agriculture; and
health-care movements are projecting alternatives to reductionist
medicine.

Since the monopoly of special interest groups over peoples'
lives is mediated by the state, these movements have political
implications. The search for alternatives to reductionism is
basically a political struggle which cuts across material and
intellectual domains. The non-reductionist alternatives that
people across the world are building together is a non-violent
science that respects the integrity of nature and man and truth
and seeks liberation of the people, which is what science is, or
should be, all about. And when a large number of little people
think alike and act together, major changes may well be in the
offing, including a change in worldview.